Harry's Ruminations

Details: http://www.devharryc.com/2019/12/hello-world-devharryc/ That's right.  I finally got off my butt, bought a domain, started hosting things on my own dime.

Roland Emmerich is famous for blowing things up. He started small enough, just destroying the Whitehouse and several notable monuments He got a bit more ambitious, destroying: New York (Godzilla) Colonial America (The Patriot) New York...again (The Day After Tomorrow), along with most of the Northern Hemisphere The entire SURFACE OF THE EARTH (2012) Where do you go after you basically bring about the Apocalypse?  Do you weep, for there are no more lands left to conquer? Nah, you attempt a passion project . So, if you like blowing things up, war seems an appropriate topic.  From the invention of gunpowder forward, any convenient war will provide plenty of KA-BOOM.   And thus, we come to Midway .  The movie should really be "The first year of World War 2 in the Pacific Theatre," but that's not catchy.  It could also be called, "I saw Pearl Harbor and thought I could do better," but we'll get to that. If this were a san...

So, my wife staged-- in love --a bit of an intervention this morning. You need to keep your hair trimmed.  You need to shave everyday.  You need to care if your clothes are wrinkled and if you have food on them.  Avoid wearing clothes that smell. In other words, it'd be better if you acted like an adult. So, first, she's absolutely right.  I've let myself go--significantly--since I've moved to Texas.  When I got here, I was 240 lbs, and swimming 1/4 mile a day in the pool.  I was comfortably in XL sized clothes, without vanity sizing. I was also 37, and I had more hair and less grey hair.  I got regular haircuts and kept my buzz between 1/8" to 1/4".  You know...tidy. Today, I'm 272 lbs, I've often gone 2 months between haircuts.  I have an explosion of grey hair and look much older than my 41 years (as of this past Saturday).  My face is sallow and jowly.  I'm wearing progressive bifocals. What can I say, I'm a middle...

As I write this, the White House is refusing to cooperate with an impeachment investigation.  Allegedly, the President used the force and weight of the United States...to help find dirt on a prospective 2020 election opponent, Joe Biden. The calculus is thus: The House has the votes to impeach him. In the senate, 20 non-Democrats need to vote to remove him from office. There's ZERO evidence that even if 'removed' from office, Trump would actually leave.  He does, after all, command the military. The courts are impotent to actually DO anything, since they rely upon the Executive to... execute . It seems we're heading for a constitutional crisis here in America, since the founders never imagined: A truly BAD ACTOR would get elected, having gone through a campaign and the electoral college. The Legislature would have NOT THE WILL to vote to remove him upon reasonable evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors The general population would be SO APATHETIC to no...

We once were a nation that tolerated "intolerable" people, that balanced inhumanity with contrition and restoration of the contrite. All fall short. We abided Daniel Webster AND John C. Calhoun, Billy Graham and Larry Flynt, MLK and George Wallace, the Black Panthers and the KKK.   Did we particularly WANT TO?     Of course not. Why, then? Because tolerance of ideas is the price of freedom. I see that freedom ending soon. Emotion is truth. Outrage becomes mandate. Thoughts must not become a crime. At the height of the Terror, a woman came to the journalist Marat in 1793 and enumerated a list of people that were secretly against the Jacobin regime. "Soon I shall have them all guillotined in Paris," he replied confidently. Marat's pen had the power to stoke outrage that led to the scaffold. Is today's "Cancel Culture" any different? https://newrepublic.com/article/155141/cancel-cultur...

Hackathon (n) 1. a design sprint -like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development , including graphic designers , interface designers , project managers , and others, often including domain experts, collaborate intensively on software projects. The goal of a hackathon is to create usable software or hardware with the goal of creating a functioning product by the end of the event. I posit Hackathons are Crap.   They are useless distractions from Actual Work® that have none of the intended outcomes for anyone involved. The goal of most hackathons are these: Provide a break from regular work for "creatives" like programmers and graphic designers. Break the top-down product cycle and let said creatives make something that seems relevant to them. Provide useful ideas as fodder for the next strategic planning cycle. Provide useful features for customers. Let me take each in turn. It is NOT a Break This is my major beef. "H...

There's no such thing as bad publicity -- P.T. Barnum So here we are.  As I type this, the House of Representatives seems ready to cave-in to impeachment proceedings . Allegedly, the President negotiated with a foreign power to obtain dirt on a possible opponent in the 2020 election.  To leverage that dirt, he withheld US foreign aid.  So the story goes. I really dislike our President.  Thankfully, in America, one can do that and not go to jail.  I resent how he personally took over my political party like a virus, how he made America less than it is for his own gain. Looking forward, if this impeachment goes forward it will have the following effects: He will not be removed from office.  The Senate will NEVER vote him out.  They've made that abundantly clear It feeds his narrative to his (minority) base that's "The Deep State" is against him because he won't play "their" game. It will lead to another 4 years of Donald Trump.  The center...

I posted this to Facebook in October 2017 after the Las Vegas shooting.  It remains valid after a weekend of carnage, and no end in sight.  FWIW, I am for constitutional gun ownership.   I am not for the capability of killing 30-50 people (not feral hogs) in under a minute.  After today, I'm struggling to see the use in an AR-15 with a binary trigger and a 100 round drum magazine. I've been next to a guy with a setup like that at the range. While not strictly speaking an automatic weapon, the purpose is clear: Sling as much lead as fast as possible downrange. Look, I'm a proud and safe gun owner. I support the right to bear arms, per our Constitution. But, if an event like today never happened again, I'd happily support outlawing semiautomatic weapons of any kind. In all candor, any legitimate use you have for a firearm works fine with a bolt action rifle, pump shotgun, or revolver. Can you really not keep someone out of your house wi...

Disclaimer: There's probably a term for this, but I've this pattern in teams and I'd like to discuss it. Scenario You have a high functioning team of 6-10 individuals.  Team culture is great.  Everyone is pulling in the same direction, and lots is getting done.  Yet, in under 4 months half the team will be gone and the rest will be considering it.  As a manager, you'll realize you can't deliver anything and it all seemed to crumble overnight.  What happened? Team Cascade failure happened Definition I'm applying Cascading Failure from engineering to teams because I propose the same causes apply. Taking the definition from Wikipedia the failure of one or few parts can trigger the failure of other parts and so on Teams get paid to produce.  At my current employer, they're paid to both produce and operate the things they produce.  As time goes on, a given team will produce up to its natural carrying capacity , when the cognitive and schedul...

Traffic in Austin seems almost reasonable during Summer. I live in Georgetown, Texas, and I work in The Domain, just off MoPac @ Burnett Rd.  For the uninitiated, that means I have a commute of about 25 miles down one of the worst highways in America .  It costs me about $2.50 in tolls to roundtrip to work, but often the toll section of MoPac is a parking lot between 8 and 10 am, and 5-7 pm.  A full work-month means I'm putting about $70 depreciation, $100 in gas, and $50 in tolls out of my pocket.  Call it $220 all-up. During the summer, this looks like me leaving the house around 8 and getting to work around 8:45 to 9.  Sixty minutes to go twenty-five miles. Believe it or not, that's a GOOD day.  Once the school year starts, the hour can easily be 90 minutes, meaning I'm on the road for 3 hours every day.  What to do? The most obvious thing is work-from-home regularly.  Nothing about my job requires my physical presence on Alterra Park...

I'm a 40 year old working software engineer. I'm not a program manager, project manager, team lead, architect, business analyst, sytems analyst, or whatever other term means "Doesn't code anymore." I make my living by telling machines what to do so the company I work for can make money (alot of it) and pay me money (a little of it, but an obscene amount still). As I sit here, I'm 2 days away from ending a three year stint with one team, and picking up with another within the same company.  The reasons aren't complicated, but it's impolitic to go into them.  Suffice it to say, I've been looking around for about 6 months internally and it took about a month to get through the transition.  Monday is 'Go' day. So I ponder: How many more of these do I have in me? If I think really hard--then give up and look at my CV--I have had these jobs professionally: IT support (scripting, custom apps) for a group of 200 mechanical engineers Pr...

I'm scared I won't be able to see when I'm 50.  If I make it to 50. I've always had poor vision, especially in my right eye.  My misshapen head grew disproportionately on the right side, so my eye sockets elongated....blah blah blah.  I'm functionally blind without glasses.  Have been since I was 8. I learned to deal with it.  I wore glasses reliably through all of my school (including college) and finally got a set of Toric contact lenses when I was 21, and I was had actual peripheral vision  until I dispensed with the contacts around age 32.  They were just too much trouble. Fast forward to last year.  Thirty nine years old, and "Wow, you have a HUGE cataract!" I'd noticed I had zero depth perception, and I increasingly just could not see  at work.  The last straw was a trip to KY where driving at night was, well, a nightmare .   My eye dominance was effectively 95% left and 5% right.  The Opthamologist was almost ...

So, I made some rocks for my daughters' rock ceremony last night. The left, JOY, is for Grace (all-caps intentional) and the right Perseverance is for Maria.  Then today, I got the "memory" of the rocks last year. That was exactly 364 days ago (Understanding == Maria, Enthusiasm == Grace).  As cliche as it sounds, it really seems like yesterday.  I'm reminded of reading the Stephen King short story My Pretty Pony .  The summary seems apt: The man also "gives instruction" on the nature of time: how when you grow up, it begins to move faster and faster, slipping away from you in great chunks if you don't hold tightly onto it. Time is a pretty pony, with a wicked heart. Another year.  I've hardly written, despite being a much changed man from a year ago. Last summer was our last with Joey.  As I write this, he's to graduate on Saturday,  enlisted in the Army and moving with his father to Alabama before that.  I did enjoy hav...

Having just ended my second trip through T he Five Love Languages by Dr. Chapman, there are things I really wish I could get through my thick skull. Apropos: We just got through Valentine's Day and the occasion seems right. 1. Being "In Love"Ends I remember my friend Dannah my freshman year.  She was one of the strongest women I'd ever met.  She had the grit and determination of her military dad, a sharp wit, and a heart as big as Dayton, Ohio.  But there was one thing. Dannah was terrified that her hometown beau, Tom, was going to "fall out of love with her."  They'd been in love for years, and with distance and experience, it seemed like that ooey-gooey feeling of "love" was going to stop. Well...it did.  The thing idiots like us didn't realize was: IT ALWAYS STOPS . Chapman argues in his book that the "in love" feeling that consumes you and spackles over every bump in your relationship might last about 2 or s...

This is how I work in my career.  Some of these are counter-intuitive and require explanation. Shipping code wins. On schedules: Picking an arbitrary deadline is often more efficient than carefully planning things out.  I've spend 20 years decrying this, but if you add up the time you spend planning, negotiating schedules, then executing, it's less pain if you just work-to-deadline and throw features overboard in the process. On teams: A disciplined team of professionals cultivating mutual trust will outperform a team of talented jerks.  There are exceptions, but only if you're writing the Linux kernel or something requiring 10x insights daily. On technology selection: Always pick the technology 1 step behind the bleeding edge , because it's mature and documented For example, when everyone was going to Rails, use Spring MVC.  This will reduce your technical risk profile in every single case.  Treat everyone as though they might be your boss someday. C...

It's been tough to be a Whovian in the past few years. First there was the Clara denouement, in which show-runner Steven Moffat demonstrated he cannot write for women.  Then, there was no  Dr. Who in 2016, period, and we suffered through the rather uneven Series 10 and Bill the social justice warrior.  Last, we're in another break, as we wait for almost another  year (October 2018) to see the first female doctor, Jodie Whittaker. Taking a look at the Revived Era, from 2005 on, we've gotten regular installments of the Madman in the Box since 2010, especially during the Matt Smith era.  The irregularity of the Capaldi era removed the show from the cultural zeitgeist, and made it "that show we used to watch." One could plot New Who like a fired artillery shell, with the Eccleston series 1 as the beginning, the Tennant  era as the meteoric rise, and the Matt Smith as the apex, and the Capaldi era as the fall to the target.  Truly, at times during ...

Context: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2018/05/war-footing-toyota-ceo-unleashes-seven-samurai-bid-survival/#more-1625584 “With our rivals and the rules of competition also changing, a life-or-death battle has begun in a world of unknowns,” [Toyota CEO] Toyoda said during a fiscal update last week. “Cost reduction is crucial. It is a fight to restore our original strength.” Dear  Toyota USA I read the article below and it sickens me. You are a great company well on the way to being FCA if you take your eye off product and think only of Expense controls. Having worked for a company that cut expense for 17 straight years (when it wasn't spending $3 Billion to buy companies it had no idea what to do with), let me be the first to say, this will not work, and it will drive your talent away. It's not employees' fault that Tundra is a dead stick. Chevy makes oodles of cash off the Tahoe/Suburban line and you can't move the metal. Your hybrid strategy is a money-lo...

I've toyed with the idea of doing a video review of this car.  If you'd like one, leave a comment So, I've had a 10th Generation 2018 Honda Civic since April 24th.  I had a little car trouble  and found myself in need of a car. Crap.  Nothing like buying a car in the middle of Spring, when everyone else is buying a car thanks to Tax Refunds.   Middle of the model year.  No incentives.  Yaaaaay . My short list went like this: Ram 1500 GM half-ton with the 5.3 V8 Buick Lacrosse Lexus GS350 Honda Accord So basically: Truck or car? Practical or practical or practical. I needed something practical I could put my wife and girls in.  I was driving around in a sweet full size Chevy Impala, so I was feeling a car again, hence the Lacrosse being on the list. I 86'd the GM as it drove too big, and Whitney homed in on the Ram and the Buick as her top 2.  On April 23rd I took off work and we went driving during the morn...

As the lights go up after a comic book movie, there are reactions one expects: Awed silence; various onomatopoetic words like "Whoa!," or (in the DC Universe) grim reflections that it either did or didn't suck as much as expected. One does not  expect seething, shocked anger like the gentlemen next to me, "Well, I'm glad I never saw Black Panther," or the repeated, mindless exclamation of a teen across the auditorium. This movie BROKE ME.  This movie completely BROKE ME.  I am Broken. Truly, after Infinity War , I think none of us will be the same again.  Our happy childhood of origin stories and side quests is over.  The reality (stone?) of us dutifully hitting the bar in our rat cages marked "comic book movie" with our $$$ since 2007 is  coming to pass.  Or, as Master Mordo said in a (much better) comic book movie: "The bill comes due." (Note: I'll try to avoid spoilers) Too Many Sorcerers...er...Characters  The film...

Dear  Ford Motor Company , My 2010 Fusion Hybrid crashed today. No, I didn't smash into anything...the electric traction system in my car crashed in the computer sense as I was rolling towards a stop sign. I was left without power brakes. Thankfully this was at ~5 mph so just stomping really hard on the pedal yielded a stop. As I approached the stop sign in electric drive mode (engine off), my dashboard lit up light a Christmas tree, displaying warning lights I didn't kno w I even had. The display shouted 'SERVICE ADVANCE TRAC SYSTEM' and my brake pedal went almost to the floor. To fix this, I did the old IT trick: I turned it off and turned it back on. Problem "solved." This seems a rather serious failure mode, as without the engine running, there's no vacuum to power the brakes. As the car can run with the engine off up to 45 mph, I'd rather not imagine stopping from that speed sans a brake booster. Having been around embedded software, I...